This is the last mix that was made during my first long-term relationship. A lot of the songs represent the longing I felt at the time to make it work and my ill-advised attempts to patch it all together. Yet, when I go back and listen to these songs, instead of reliving a lot of anguish over how it all slipped through my fingers, I instead recall the growing satisfaction with solitude that I was beginning to learn back then. A lot of my happiest moments in those days were spent by myself. Some were prayerful, some were exploratory, and some were just plain relaxing. Some of these songs were the ones that helped to prepare me for a difficult process of letting go.

If you could graph my emotions during the spring of 2001, it would be a slowly declining spoke with a sudden spike in the middle of March. That spike represents my first trip to Hawaii, a place that would come to have great significance in my life even if I had no way of knowing it at the time. At this point, I desperately wanted a way to “rekindle” the fire that was rapidly dying out in my relationship with Sharon, and once the opportunity to visit a friend of hers in Hawaii came up, I held out a lot of hope that our time there together would revive our happiness.